Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts

Monday, December 11, 2023

Inward Sea

Remembering's such a liquid world,
as if what is recalled swims out of murk--
the mind diving to meet it once again--
and then the memory waggles back to depths.

But what's down there, down deep,
forever, never to swim up again?
There, not there, what weird forgotten
creatures or shards of little shipwrecks

might emerge? You think this as you lean,
look past the edge of now, the present moment
rocking like a boat. Remembering, or not,
you look into that inward sea of yours. 


hans ostrom 2023

Friday, September 1, 2023

Nose to the Glass

Oh, the stories you tell yourself
about yourself. Constantly.
Certain scenes keep coming around
like mail delivery. You recall bad
behavior. It begs at once for
regrets and excuses, which,
combined like soda and vinegar,
merely fizz. You invent arcs

in your life, heroic ups and downs.
You list alleged achievements.
You indict, forgive, forget, fudge,
and, exhausted, give in to fatalism.

You keep this silly sense of Self
afloat like a raft on a slow river.
No, it's more like Self's just a
habit, like a mannequin in a
window you walk by compulsively
or stare at, nose to the glass.

hans ostrom

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Crowded Mind

The mind: an airport, a stadium. From any place
or time in our lives, people push in & through,
invited maybe, mostly not: memory's
a wicked host. Ah, yes, Billy in
second grade, you were mean to him,
once, and it's haunted you since then
(if alive, Billy has forgotten you, of course).

Brown Lucina, seductive at 17, clouds
of perfume, precocious bust, she took
your arm and waltzed you to algebra class,
summoning an erection. Our

mental space: elastic, stuffed--
guilt, desire, nostalgia & the rest
howl like barkers outside clubs &
you can't say "Get out!" til it's
too late. You don't get to talk
as faces rush in, except perhaps
in some sad revisionist script:
you with your loser's bon mot.


hans ostrom 2023

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

oh memory, oh winter bee

memory seems like a silver
city, a golden continent, a
paisley planet. but if you ventured
to Past, you'd land
in a swamp of minutes,
a humidity of duties,
nettles of the now,
and the who you were then.

my god, memory's a façade,
a sliding presentation to yourself,
the greatest hits and duds.
life is thick as mud, as
tangled as a junkyard,
an all-at-once crammed
into thimbles and shot glasses.

you long to go back sometimes,
a winter bee honeyed with glee
for the buzzing of what was.
you can't go, because and because.


hans ostrom 2021

Friday, January 8, 2021

Idiosynchronized

People we see once: flood of faces, coats,

collars--on avenues and plazas,  in markets, 

theatres, bars, banks, hospitals.  A bent


shape hoeing weeds: one of us saw it once

one place from a train: This

is an example but only of itself.  Its


singularity can’t be transposed.  Imagine

you remember the person who interested you

terribly in that café that morning that city.


Sure it happened, but you don’t remember

because once was not enough.  People we

see once compose our lives.  Forgetting


them (we must), we lose wide arenas

of the lived.   Even ghosts return, but not

the vast mass of once-only-noticed


who compose medium and matrix

of our one time here.  We are adjacent and

circumstantial to strangers, one jostle


of flux away from knowing next to everything

about their lives.  The river of moments takes

a different channel; the one moment becomes nothing now.


The once-only appear, then appear to go 

to an Elsewhere that defines us.  They go on

to get to know who they get to know.


Their lives are theoretically real to us, like

subatomic particles.  To them their lives

are practically real to them.   From their


view, ours are not.  We know they were there,

vivid strangers, because they always are, 

every day.  Like a wreath floating 


 on the ocean, memory marks a space 

abandoned.   In large measure life is

recall of spaces occupied.  History


consists of someone who insists on being

remembered, someone who insists on 

remembering, combinations of both.  Familiarity 


and routine join to vie methodically; they

capture places in recall.  Vivid strangers are

incidentally crucial, indigenous to a


present moment that is like a mist

over a meadow, rising, evaporating 

just when we arrive, past as we are present.


Saturday, August 1, 2020

"Tawny," by Carl Sandburg

Reading/video of a very short poem by Carl Sandburg concerning a color category, a season, and a memory of a face. From his book Smoke and Steel (1922).

Friday, December 6, 2019

What Happened to What Happened

I know what happened
to what happened. It sits
right here in my hand
like a small bird,
a little bit of sand,
or a few notes that fell
out of a song.


hans ostrom 2019

Sunday, June 30, 2019

Palomino Summer

I drank and drank and drank
sunshine.

                I walked down
powder-dust ruts of an uncle's
dirt road and found that palomino.

Blond horse, quick as fragrance. Blond
summer, baking brown mud. Blond
grass, insane with grasshoppers.
Brown me in the the midst,

palomino's mane brushing my arms
in the rush of gallop. In the woods
next to the ranch, rattlesnakes

coiled, field mice inside them.
Pine trees leaned toward
the pasture I rode in.


hans ostrom 2019

Friday, June 7, 2019

A Statistic and I

Someone told me that
on average 153,424 people
die each day. Globally.
That's a terrible thing
to tell someone, I thought,
before thinking of the
galaxies of memory
the minds of 153,424
contained before they
vanished.


hans ostrom 2019

Monday, April 29, 2019

The Very Nowness of You

 ("The Very Thought of You," a
ballad composed by Ray Noble)


The nowness of you
in your motion and thinking,
the present rectitude of your
existence, with earrings, as
it happens (it happens)--
this is separate from our life
together. Our life together
is an invisible sculpture
representing our ideas
and memories of us. It's
exhibited in the gallery of days.
The you right-now-here is
someone and something
to be discovered, and it seems
I just discovered you one
more time. I find it quite exciting.


hans ostrom 2019


Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Friday, February 9, 2018

Cigar Smoke is Thick and Blue

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

--psychiatrist Allen Wheelis (1950), who credited the statement to Freud


Sometimes a cigar
isn't a cigar, such as after
it's been smoked
and the remaining brown wad
has gone away.

Then the cigar
becomes particles
as well as neural bits
of cigar-likenesses,
or a word in a story
about that one night
and its cigars.



hans ostrom 2018

Friday, December 29, 2017

Remember, You Know?

To know, remember.
Remember to know.
December and snow:
Remember? September,

remember, is a different
month, and November's
hardly a June. So
long ago. So long, Ago!

Words are diplomats
They mean to know.
All are members
of the Memory Chateau.



hans ostrom 2017

Friday, December 1, 2017

A Composed Affair

I recall the affair
as clearly as if
it had happened a long
time ago, which it
did, but not before

starting as an impromptu,
developing into an etude,
going through a prelude
to get to some
energetic nocturnes,
with several scherzos,
rondos, and sarabands
included for good pleasure.

The affair ended
as if by composed
design, how refreshing.
The final note
was held but not
amplified or for long.


hans ostrom 2017

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Today in Memory World

Another brilliant day
of pretending to recover
time by accessing images
of spaces-past and a few
of the people in them then,
including us. It's a strange
system, but it's about all
we have. Meanwhile, we
continued to float down the
river for the first and last time.



hans ostrom 2017

Monday, February 16, 2015

"Memory Unit"

In the Memory Unit, we speak
euphemistically. We
watch the very old and almost
mindless sit or lie like reptiles
that are waiting for the warmth
to come back. These wait
for the memory-sun
to unset itself.

Our uncle is among them here.
What are we supposed to say
to the past, which is absent?
What are we supposed to do
with our rage and embarrassment
before this scandal, this
crucifixion of identity?

We keep our visits short,
is what we do. For a while,
in our conveyance later, we
are as quiet as the Memory Unit.
Then someone speaks. We understand.
We speak back. We're understood.

hans ostrom 2015




Wednesday, September 10, 2014

"The Cabin at Lavezolla Creek," by Hans Ostrom


When we built the Jones cabin
up Lavezolla Creek, summer,
Sierra Nevada, we left home
in the loaded pickup and worked
ten-hour days. The droning drive
in the '69 Ford F-100
took an hour one way.

The Old Man was nearing 60 years
then. At noon he'd take a cat-nap
on the plywood sub-floor, his silver
lunch-bucket the pillow, his hat
over his eyes. Snored. I remember
something like pity arising in me.
Now I'm sixty, the Old Man's been dead
a long time, and I ended up with
the green Ford pickup, which people
think is "cool." The recall

of bright summer, big conifers,
the quick creek, and work to make
you bone tired seems now like
something that will disappear soon,
like a butterfly or pine-pollen
floating in lustrous air. These tributary
memories that shape our maps
of ourselves disappear as we do.
No one will remember that the Old Man
and I were the crew.



hans ostrom 2014


Tuesday, June 17, 2014

"Thinking at a Funeral," by Hans Ostrom

It's sad to think that those little
private,unfounded beliefs (blue underwear
will bring me luck
)will die
with each of us,
along with the complex cultures
we create in our minds, whereas something
truly silly like labeling water H-2-0
will persist indefinitely. I was

thinking this at a funeral when
I was supposed to be listening
to a "friend" of the deceased
talk almost exclusively about
himself, not the life of
the dead man. Dear Lord:
there are over 7 billion
vagabond human minds on Earth;
please advise.



hans ostrom 2014


Friday, December 14, 2012

Message From Dolores



Someone named Dolores
called for you today. 
She lives in the 1940s,
asks that you visit her there.
Seems she has details
of history to share—wool
skirts, unfiltered cigarettes,
a porter on a Pullman car
who saw too much, a neighbor
who never came back
from Tule Lake.  She wants
to play records for you—
78 RPM, thick as UFOs.
She wants you to understand
what it was like for her, what
she had, chose, and refused
to do. She understands how
busy you are.  Still she’d
like to see you.  Open
one of those boxes in storage,
find a photo of or words from
Dolores.  Walk through the
page.  Dolores will be waiting,
holding a Chesterfield just so,
ready to tell you about women
and men back then.  Don’t
worry.  She can’t come back
but you can.  You have a pass
that lets you go between now
and then.  The price of the pass
is just to think about the past.
That’s all.  That’s really all
there is to it.  Ask Dolores.


--Hans Ostrom, copyright 2012